Quintiles looks to go public

Quintiles, the Durham-based multinational company that manages clinical trials and provides other contract services for pharmaceutical companies, is looking to raise $600 million through an initial public offering of stock.
The company filed a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday for a proposed initial public offering. That confirmed previous reports, which had not been confirmed by Quintiles officials, that there were plans to take the company public again.
This would be Quintiles’ second time going public. The company went public in 1994. In 2003, founder and former CEO Dennis Gillings led a company buy-back along with private equity investors to take it private again.
The Durham-based company’s major business is in the management of clinical trials and associated laboratory and analysis work for pharmaceutical companies, and it also provides contract drug sales, among other services.
Based on reported revenues, the company said it’s 1.7 times the size of its closest contract research organization competitor, and is the market leader in the United States, Japan and in Europe.
Last year, the company’s service revenues were up about 12 percent to $3.7 billion. It also reported that its cost of revenues were also up about 14 percent year-over-year to about $3.6 billion.
Quintiles Transnational Holdings reported a net income of $177.5 million for the year, which was down about 26 percent compared with the prior year.
The company has its executive headquarters in Durham near the Research Triangle Park, and has 27,412 full-time equipment employees in 60 countries as of Dec. 31, according to the SEC filing. Of that total, the company said 10,598 workers were in the Americas.
According to the SEC filing, Quintiles officials expect research and development spending to grow as major biopharmaceutical companies look to regain revenues lost from the “patent cliff” of recent years, and for other reasons. Company leaders also expect that work to be increasingly outsourced compared with 2011 levels.
Quintiles was founded in 1982 by Gillings, who was a biostatistics professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He and his co-founder used statistical algorithms to improve data used to determine drug therapy efficacy, according to the SEC filing. Quintiles expanded to Europe in 1987 and then to Asia in 1993.
In 2008, Quintiles completed a shareholder reorganization that made Bain Capital and TPG Capital lead company investors, alongside others.
Gillings stepped down from the role of chief executive in April of last year. Tom Pike, a former leader at the global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company Accenture, was named Quintiles’ new CEO.
In a news release on Friday, the company said it expects to use net proceeds from the proposed public offering to repay a portion of the company’s long-term debt, and also for corporate purposes.
The number of shares that Quintiles and its shareholders will offer has not yet been determined, and neither has the price range of the shares, according to the release.
Phil Bridges, a spokesman for Quintiles, said the company has entered into a traditional quiet period following the filing of the SEC registration statement. He said he could not comment Monday beyond information in the press release.